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Wassily Kandinsky Facts

Wassily Kandinsky Facts
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter known for being one of the founding fathers of abstract art in the early 1900s. Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 16th, 1866 in Moscow, Russia, to Lidia Ticheeva, and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant. When only five years old his parents divorced and Wassily went to live with his aunt. In grammar school he learned how to play the cello and the piano, and studied drawing. In 1886 he entered law school as his family had hoped, and graduated with honors. Eventually in 1896 he gave up law to study art at the Munich Academy, beginning his career as an artist.
Interesting Wassily Kandinsky Facts:
In 1892 Wassily Kandinsky married Anna Chimyakina, his cousin.
He worked as a law teacher until 1896, a year after he saw a French Impressionists' art exhibition in Moscow. He moved to Munich to study art.
Wassily Kandinsky's early work was inspired by music and color as emotion and in the first decade of the 1900s he focused on expressing this in his art. This led to his eventual label as a founding father of abstract art.
Wassily founded the New Artists Association in Munich. He also formed the Blue Rider group with Franz Marc, another artist, and he also joined the Bauhaus movement.
In 1903 Wassily moved in with another art student Gabriele Munter. He divorced his wife and traveled with Gabriele until they settled in Bavaria, prior to the beginning of World War I.
When World War I broke out Wassily Kandinsky moved back to Russia, and met his next wife Nina Andreevskaya. They had a son together but he only lived to be three years old.
His work was not met with the reception he had hoped in Russia and he returned to Germany.
When Wassily Kandinsky returned to Germany he became a teacher at Berlin's Bauhaus school. In 1933 Nazis stormed the school and shut it down.
In 1937 Wassily Kandinsky's work was exhibited in the 'Degenerate Art Exhibition'. Many people attended the exhibition, but the Nazis confiscated 57 of his paintings.
Wassily and Nina moved to Paris in the late 1930s, but in 1940 the Nazis invaded and he fled. He returned to Paris after the war.
Towards the end of his life Wassily Kandinsky became depressed as his work was not selling as well. However many people including Solomon Guggenheim, were supporters of his work and style.
Wassily Kandinsky died on December 13th, 1944 at the age of 77, in France.
Wassily Kandinsky's most famous works of art include The Blue Rider, Composition VI, Composition VII, On White II, and Contrasting Sounds.
The titles of Wassily's work often included words that referred to music such as composition.
Although much of Wassily Kandinsky's work in Russia did not survive, a lot of the work he created in Germany did.
Kandinsky's painting Fugue (1914) sold for $20.9 million in 1990.
Kandinsky's painting Studie für Improvisation 8 (1909) sold for $23 million in 2012.
A children's biography book based on Kandinsky and his art was published in 2014. It was written by Mary GrandPre and titled The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky's Abstract Art. It won the 2015 Caldecott Honor.


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